dried leaves on the surface of a pool
by McChanged
Summary: You wonder when you'll get the chance to blow the grey matter right out of his head./ A story about losing yourself, and never quite finding your way back. AU-ish.


Okay. Here's the thing. I don't really know where this came from, but I kind of sort of love it to bits. I know the pairing, as of now, but I don't know whether I will reveal it in the second half, because I like the idea that you can make it your own. It's a AU but there is and will be some Glee components mixed in just fun. I'm telling you now that I was listening to John Mayer, Keane, and the beautiful songs _Scratch_ by Kendall Payne and _Unlike Me_ by Kate Havenik while drinking green tea and eating far too much chocolate. That's the state I write in; that's my excuse.

Don't own.

* * *

><p>"<em>History repeats itself. Somebody says this. History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters. History is a little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of. I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours."<em>

_-_Richard Siken, _Little Beast_

It smells damp; smells of rainwater seeping into cracked soil and warm water evaporating off white tile. Smells like the lake you spent a summer swimming in, of nights where the windows were thrown open so you could hear the sound of the world crashing in on itself. This is what you'll remember later.

That it smelled of rain, and you couldn't breathe.

When you're in the middle of it, center stage for the world to see, it's easy to lose track of the little things. The details you didn't pay attention to. But later, when it's three a.m. and the windows are thrown open for the oncoming storm, and the shower floor is still wet, you remember. It's the stupidest things, too. How the tips of his hair felt when he'd come in from a morning run, or the sound of his voice late at night after a day of wearing somebody else's skin.

When you're well past the middle of it, you can feel the thrum of him beneath your skin. In early dawn you are him and you are the sound of his voice, the feel of his hair.

You are him, and you are someone you don't know anymore.

Once you believed he was someone who would go out in a hailstorm of bullets. It was the way he moved, the way he held a gun. He was in constant motion like he was afraid standing still would kill him. He dies anyway. A single bullet to the back of the head. Life is funny like that.

You like to lay on his floor and breathe in the parts of himself he left behind. It smells of chaos, of rainwater. Of black ink and passport paper and the faintest hint of sawdust.

It smells like a tragedy that hasn't be written yet.

You're first meeting isn't extraordinary. It isn't meant for the movies, there's no sweeping crescendo as your eyes meet. There's just you and him, the barrels of your guns recklessly pointed at someone you nothing of. And after, you don't think of love at first sight or love at all. Instead you think of the bullet in your right shoulder and the matching one in his. You wonder if he finds it harder to bandage with one good hand, or if he's done it enough times to do it unthinkingly.

You wonder when you'll get the chance to blow the grey matter right out of his head.

Once, a couple years after that first incident, when your shoulder is no longer stiff, you're his alibi.

It's Chicago, and it's freezing and there's two hundred thousand missing from a vault on Lasalle street. He was careful, but they go back months, connect the dots like the detectives couldn't in New York, or Vegas, or Phoenix and he calls you from an interrogation room. You're not friends, but you're not enemies and there was that thing in Seattle eight months ago so you go because unpaid debts are irksome to you.

He's a mess. White t-shirt, low hanging jeans, sneakers. It's startling, actually, and you hesitate at the threshold. Because this guy, this strange man with the look of an aging gang-banger, is nothing like the one with the matching scar, with his perfectly cut suits. His briefcases full of money, and the put together apartment you once broke into just to see if you could, only to end up with a gun to your head.

You don't know this man, but you know his story, some of it, and you hesitate.

He turns when you let out the breath you've been holding since you got his call, since Seattle, since the night you watched his blood splatter across slick, white tile. It's only then that you get it, this person, the one with his imperfections coating the air around him, he's just another on a long list of the people he's been. You get him out because you can, and a year from then he'll return the favor.

That's the thing that matters.

In Seattle, you have a bruise blossoming over the left side of your face, a broken wrist, so it takes you awhile to get the numbers right.

He answers on the fourth ring, and you're vaguely aware that he was your first call, your only call. Trust like that is a dangerous game.

"How much trouble could you possibly get in while in Seattle?"

It's his standard greeting, a tilt to the words that is one part confused and three parts condescending. It's his way of reminding you that he's in the same game, knows carelessness can get you a bullet.

"That's funny from a guy who got stabbed in Kansas. I need a passport." You're slightly out of breath, throwing things into your suitcase that probably aren't yours. You're avoiding mirrors, and dripping blood on to the white carpet, the bathroom floor.

"Who knew farmers were so protective of their life savings. You know the rest of the world isn't as forgiving as America is, right?" There's a shuffle on his side, the sound of a gun being snapped apart. It's strange that you remember how effortless it was for him, his wrists twisting.

"I like to test my own theories, thank you very much. Do you have one for me or not?"

He pauses, the sounds on his end fading before he breathes a light laugh. It's the first time you've heard him make the sound.

"Your jacket pocket. I hear Greece is wonderful this time of year." The line clicks off. You don't wonder how he got to Seattle from Colombia so quickly.

You go to Greece, and Spain, and Australia just for the hell of it.

You're packing your suitcase in Tamworth when your phone rings. It's an Illinois area code.

It's goes like that for awhile. Helping because debts are a bitch, because you know people, and he knows how to get rid of people.

There's Mexico with his broken arm and the blood on your pants, your shoes, a smudge above your eye. Japan with a bullet graze across your side and his t-shirt rumpled. California with a knife to his throat and you deciding who to shoot first.

There's Texas, and Ireland. Argentina, Colorado, and maybe Nigeria or Ghana but that is still kind of blurry with a concussion. There are all these places, and you don't realize that there's no time alone in between the last couple until you're bleeding out in an alley in Italy.

The beginning isn't much of a beginning, because it's not raining and neither of you are bleeding for once, but still when you look back it's the moment you'll think of first.

He's lying flat on his back on a football field in Ohio, and for some reason you feel like this would have been the beginning in any of your stories. He's beautiful, undeniably so, it's not something he flaunts, but something that works in his favor. There are details you remember, the smell of dew on freshly cut grass, the buzzing sound of cicadas, the taste of late July on your tongue, thick with opportunity, with excitement. But mostly you remember the look on his face when he twisted to look at you. When you're flat on your back and he's leaning half over you asking about Russia or South America or Africa.

Later, you'll say sorry.

Sorry for the way I marred the skin on your neck_, _the inside of your elbow. Sorry for taking so long, sorry for not taking long enough_._

You were never good with apologizes and he has always been terrible with accepting them. It's not until you're sitting on your balcony, nursing a beer, that you realize your life will always be like this.

Unfortunately, you're not wrong.


End file.
